Treasure Island

The boy is Jim Hawkins, the innkeeper's son, and when a bluff squire and a steady doctor decide to sail for the treasure, Jim goes with them. The story is his to tell, remembered years on. Aboard the Hispaniola he meets the ship's cook, Long John Silver, hopping nimbly on his crutch "like a bird," his broad face pale and smiling. Everyone takes to him. Jim most of all.

Then, one still evening as the island comes into view, Jim climbs into an apple barrel for a snack, grows drowsy, and hears Silver settle down nearby to talk. Within a dozen words he understands that the lives of every honest man aboard now rest on him alone.

Stevenson wrote a sea adventure that has never stopped feeling like one — the tar and salt of a crowded dock, a blind beggar tapping toward the door, the long menace hidden inside easy warmth. It is a book about a boy learning what men are, out where no one can protect him, and the door it opens is the oldest one there is: a map, a ship, and the question of who can be trusted.